The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package astropy, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we provide an overview of the organization of the Astropy project and summarize key features in the core package, as of the recent major release, version 2.0. We then describe the project infrastructure designed to facilitate and support development for a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages. We conclude with a future outlook of planned new features and directions for the broader Astropy Project.

We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core astronomy-related functionality to the community, including support for domain-specific file formats such as flexible image transport system (FITS) files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy, celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS) support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions. Significant functionality is under active development, such as a model fitting framework, VO client and server tools, and aperture and point spread function (PSF) photometry tools. The core development team is actively making additions and enhancements to the current code base, and we encourage anyone interested to participate in the development of future Astropy versions.

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a b s t r a c tWe present the case for developing a successor format for the immensely successful FITS format. We first review existing alternative formats and discuss why we do not believe they provide an adequate solution. The proposed format is called the Advanced Scientific Data Format (ASDF) and is based on an existing text format, YAML, that we believe removes most of the current problems with the FITS format. An overview of the capabilities of the new format is given along with specific examples. This format has the advantage that it does not limit the size of attribute names (akin to FITS keyword names) nor place restrictions on the size or type of values attributes have. Hierarchical relationships are explicit in the syntax and require no special conventions. Finally, it is capable of storing binary data within the file in its binary form. At its basic level, the format proposed has much greater applicability than for just astronomical data.

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